The logic is not there. If you wanted a premium seat before you still had to ATTEND the game and show up early. You couldn't get a premium seat by staying home..

This policy will affect student attendance, and the timeliness of their attendance to the most minimal degree because the policy does almost nothing to counter the experience that students can have with viable substitutes (such as tailgating or staying at home/having a watch party and getting better food, having and using better bathrooms/access, and all the rest).

This policy is another attempt to "fix" student attendance, a national problem which many schools are trying to rectify by instituting various similar policies. None of them have worked and none of them will work because they are cheap attempts to fix the issue without spending any real money to improve the students' personal gameday experience.

You're right. I am bitter that I graduated and now live out of state. I enjoyed every moment of the two games I went to last year. I couldn't let something like general admission seating ruin Michigan football.

The point was that the griping was in regards to how bad it sucked to have your senior year marred by GA. I'm saying that I would gladly trade reserved seat "senior" tickets (which weren't even that good) to 3-8, Threetsheridammit, and Fan Endurance III (my last game as a student) for GA tickets to the 2013 season.

Obviously, if we're looking at whole student career, I started in '04 (5 year BSE/MSE), so I got to see Braylonfest, Henne to Manningham, 2006, and the whole careers of Henne and Hart. That's better than a 5 year stretch from 2007 to 2010 would have been, no argument there.

The hybrid system is only for 2014 though. 2015 will be a strict points system based off of 2014 attendance and class standing will count for nothing. You get three points for going to a game, and three more points for showing up 30min before kickoff. With six 2014 home games, you get a maximum of 36 points for a season. My understanding of it is that if you're a junior and your senior and sophomore friends all have 36 points, you'll all have equivalent seating. No "bonus points" for being a senior.

Seems to me that class standing ought at least be a tie-breaker for those with equivalent points, but that's a relatively minor blemish on what seems like a good move overall. Credit to the Athletic Department for recognizing that last year's GA approach was flawed.

Barely any school throws in free football tix these days with tuition. That would be nice, though.

It just seems reasonable to me. But for the accountants out there, I wonder if $42 is reasonable? Compared to other tickets around the Big House for $95? I paid $10/ticket for student tickets in 1993. The other tickets were around $25.

$95? Like the other reply said, you must have no experience with the student ticket market (which is understandable), but honestly, I doubt even regular tickets were fetching that much (except ND). The secondary market for student tickets is not even close to that. If you were patient last year, you could have very easily gotten every ticket outside of ND/OHIO for no more than $10, and even Ohio was going for face value with it being spring break. $42 isn't completely unreasonable, but for next year, when I can just as easily get them for under 100$ from other students, it's not realistic.

I don't think you understand the market for student tickets. It's really high. I'm gonna buy them just so I don't have to deal with finding a ticket before every week, but I guarantee I could find individual student tickets for every game for a much lower total than 295.

I was paying under $20/ ticket and if I couldn't make a game (I missed 2 in 5 years) the tickets were easy to transfer. This is a major increase to over double the price for students along with all the other increases in tuition. A 225% increase in price is not because of inflation.

Comparing the costs to what the rest of the stadium pays is ignorant to me. Students, who are already paying 10's of thousands per year in tuition, should be encouraged to go to games, and pricing them out not a smart endeaver for the athletic department. Once they graduate, they pay the same as you, and this is just.

Once again the Athletic Department overcomplicated this and still raised football season ticket prices for a shitty card.

More ushers are once again going to be required to escort groups to their specific seating arrangements and yell at students that continue moving around to see other friends, even during pregrame.. (because this is soviet school bus and you are walked to your seat and must never move)

They're gonna need ropes once again to plot out the blocks of seating for each group of friends because the various bench seating does not make it simple for ushers to be Nazis from a distance and they'd have a tough time knowing WTF is going on..

If the chief concern of the Athletic Department and students was to allow students to sit with friends in a hassle free environment (as they said was the main issue) they'd simply allow students to show up and sit wherever the hell they wanted. This is going to look like a reserved seating version of the Notre Dame game instead of a show up and get the Notre Dame game roping system like happened this past year

in different years, as well as up in row 80 for two. The best were my 5th year around row 20. Down low is a lot of fun, but it was always really hard to determine how good a play really was. I'm guessing with the tradition now of celbrations in the corner, seating down low is still a desired spot to be.

The one tweak I would make is to allow the people or groups with "Superfan" status to pick where they want to be. Not everyone wants to be in the very front. I thought you got better views of the game from around row 25-30 or so.

I don't like class-based seating, but I'm digging the attendance points idea. Reward the people who come early and to all the games. As long as it's by section (a la basketball) and not by individual seats, I think they've got something here.

One thing I haven't seen mentioned in the comments so far is that the "hybrid" system applies only for 2014. After that, priority is based entirely on the previous season's points.

On the one hand, that's great that you can have a mixed group and still sit together in "premium" seats without a penalty for having a sophomore in the group. Also, the low rows will be dominated by people who show up, not giant groups of late arriving drunkards who happen to be seniors. And I like that it gives you "one free game" to miss, and doesn't penalize you for not attending non-football events.

On the other hand, it would be nice if class standing added a few points somehow, to prevent someone who, say, takes a semester abroad, from totally losing their priority.

What will be interesting is how points are assigned - by ticket, or by M-Card (that is, do the points go to the original purchaser or the person who actually uses the ticket)? Doing it by ticket would seem to be the way to go, since it would incentivize students to sell or give away tickets they aren't using, and make sure whoever they give it to shows up.

I would agree that getting some bonus points based on class, or seasons attended, or even both would be nice. It could be small and still be worth it. Three points for a senior, two for junior, and one for sophomore.

Not a terrible change, but the seating is irrelevant to me because the important part of that article is that they will be continuing to charge $300 for the sorry slate of games they have lined up next year. Fat chance I'll pay that.

Starting with the 2015 season, all reserved seat locations will be decided strictly by attendance points. Attendance points are accumulated for each game attended (3 points). Arriving 30 minutes prior to kickoff earn an additional three (3) points, for a total of six (6) points. There will be no class standing-based perks or points starting with the 2015 football season. A group’s standing (and seat location) will be calculated by an average group score from the previous year’s point total.

Students can earn up to 36 points for the 2014 season, the equivalent of showing up to six (6) games at least 30 minutes prior to kickoff. Lochmann stated that the athletic department would only count six games instead of all seven, providing students with the benefit of the doubt for situations like holidays, student break, weather, etc., that can affect their attendance.

I do find it interesting, how for smallish groups (say 4-8 people), you may have to dump a friend/roommate who will significantly bring down your average. "Sorry, Braden. You'll have to sit with another group of people b/c you only attended two games last year." The peer pressure (to go to games) and resentment (if you are shunned) should be worth a few MGoBoard board posts.

Frankly, I was pissed at my roommates when they would want to have that extra beer and miss the band coming out. This gives people like me another weapon to say "smuggle a airplane bottle in and lets go." Or, you boot them.

The good thing is it is an average. You don't automatically get the lowest priority. If you have several people in a group that routinely showed up late last year, then don't be in their group if you want the best possible seats!

Honestly if they're enough of a friend that you want to spend 7 fall Saturdays with them and would actually feel bad kicking them out, them being in your group is more important than the marginal benefit of being a couple rows lower.

I wouldn't care about a couple rows (who would?) but I'd care about getting there for the band's entrance.

And if my friend is any kind of friend at all, he would accept that is probably more of a priority than one more beer.

But then, my best friends were the ones who got that and were on the same page. By senior year I found my group of friends that partied before (maybe started a little earlier) and was still able to make the band's entrance.

Before, in my time in the last 2000s, it was based on seniority and a bit of randomness.

If you were in a group of seniors that had a freshman in it, you were given freshman priority - which this fixes in a fair manner (average seniority).

Also, you weren't guaranteed better seats because of groups and puzzle-pieces blocks of people together. I never got tickets in a group and I routinely had better tickets that many groups of people with higher seniority. My senior year my tickets were in row 17, so there's never any guarantee you would get to the front row or even the front 6-10 rows.

Decades of sell-outs and part of the largest attendance in America every game. I'm sure this should all be credited to alumni and other fans right?

People need to recognize that some of the moves the AD has made and our performance on the field are enough to turn off many fanbases and students are a part of that fanbase. I'm not saying that more students shouldn't show up to the games, and show up on time, but the amount of disgust directed at students on this board is seriously misguided

I was there for two games in 2013; their game versus Florida A&M (disappointing that the Rattlers' band was still banned) and San Diego State.

And it was NOTHING like the Michigan students' pathetic showing. They were mostly filled for "Quick Cals" with the team and coaches which is BEFORE their band comes out and like 15-20 minutes before the team comes out for the national anthem.

So those were two low-grade opponents, early in the season on summer-like beautiful days. And still they had their stadium filled, that early.

It is almost a mirror image of Michigan, where the PSD-paying regulars are there in time to fill the place for the band to "take the field." And the students are laggards. At Ohio Stadium, the two endzone Block O sections are the ones that fill up early.

I think it has to do more with the success of the program on a year over year basis. When Michigan was winning 10 games a year and beating Ohio and State, we didn't have this issue. When we barely scrape by Akron, and have the RR years, people tend to lose interest and hope in the team.

After reading this article, I still think this is mostly a money decision. The University saw that there was probably going to be a sharp decrease in demand with next year's schedule if they continued to keep the prices the same (which I doubt was ever seriously on the table), so they needed to make a reason for students to pay that high face value price. Is it better than last year's system? Probably, but I still doubt the leading decision to make this change was student satisfaction.